Video Artwork Research Articles

Portrait of a Girly Girl: When Recording a Video Selfie is a Feminist Practice

YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are increasingly used today as tools of resistance and environments of expression. This paper will focus on feminist video-selfies that address stereotypes of the female body, status and behaviour and propose to ironically dismantle them. The article will consider issues of female networked presence and creativity by referring to early attempts to create a personal video channel, documented by Elisa Giardina Papa in her video artwork need ideas!?!PLZ!! (2011). The undercover presentation of political content will be discussed as an activist strategy, as in artist Addie Wagenknecht’s fake make-up tutorials, in which she actually gives instructions on how to protect oneself both online and offline. Video-selfies are widely shared on social platforms as a playful way to meditate on personal identity. This happens, for example, thanks to the social filters of the artist S()fia Braga, which allow users to freely experiment with unfathomable views of themselves and to interact with others in a performative way. All these examples use creative strategies to convey a critical message. While never discouraging physical protest, they offer another ground for activism and dissent, and the possibility of literally embodying them.

On Perceiving Molecular Time: Computational Chemical Simulations and the Moving Image

The perception of time undergoes a radical shift between the human scale and the nanoscale. In an age of rapidly evolving media and scientific technologies, we need to understand how these impact human perception and visual culture. This essay explores computational molecular simulations through the lenses of temporal media theory and moving image practice. Emerging from a creative fellowship with a physical chemistry research group, I focus on two moving image works that depict crystalline structures. One is a nanoscale computational simulation of soot formation and the other is a durational video artwork showing the dissolution of sugar. Computational molecular simulations are shown to produce a feeling of time by smearing an extremely short duration across a longer perceptible duration. This analysis uncovers how the awareness of media as a construct troubles our chronoception (perception of time), while unexpectedly, the screen becomes complicit in scientists’ expert temporal understanding. The videos present vastly different spatial and temporal scales and have different chronoceptive effects: one gives a sense of being within time, the other across time. Ultimately, computational simulations emerge as isomorphic media that have explicit aesthetic properties that connect us to the implicit, abstract energetics of chemical reactivity.

МЕТОДОЛОГИЯ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ ВИДЕОАРТА В РОССИЙСКОМ ИСКУССТВОВЕДЕНИИ

The article is devoted to the review of methodological tools used by Russian specialists in videoart studies. The paper identifies key problems of conducting cognitive activity regarding videoart within conceptual and subject-conceptual discourses, as well as classifies various approaches used by Russian art historians in the study of video artworks. The results obtained allow us to record the current amplitude of variability of researchers’ reflection in relation to video art within Russian art history. The conclusions reached can be used to simplify the entry of novice scholars who are focused on videoart into the existing research tradition, but at the same time, to further problematize it and search for more optimal cognitive strategies for understanding this specific form of screen art.

Art of Failure: Soni Kum’s Morning Dew Project and Diasporic Aesthetics

Abstract To date, one of the first video artworks by and about Zainichi (ethnic Koreans living in Japan), Zainichi artist Soni Kum’s three-channel video work Morning Dew (2020) is based on her interviews with sixteen Zainichi Koreans who went to North Korea during the repatriation project (1959–1984) and came back to Japan, and their descendants. I argue that Morning Dew, deliberately fails to give a coherent Zainichi representation, and in doing so, locates Zainichi experience in a context of the global diaspora, especially through the incongruent video montages on three screens, having animals lead the narrative, and filming the void. Queer imagination of failure helps explain the ways in which Kum’s aesthetic choices and her lived experience intersect. Responsive to the bifurcated gender discourse that threatens the legibility of queer lives, queer failure helps to unveil the structural polarization in identity-based knowledge formation and explicate Kum’s art of failing as a means to convey a portrayal more faithful to the diasporic life of Zainichi Koreans.

Mapping a Mobile and Embodied Grief: Adaptable and Portable Mourning Practices in A young Yu’s Mourning Rituals

Abstract This article discusses A young Yu’s single-channel video artwork Mourning Rituals (2022) and the way it examines loss across personal, ancestral, historical, and geographical registers and suggests that mourning rituals in our contemporary world must be adaptable and portable. A 22-minute performance-based work, Mourning Rituals reimagines the Korean ssitkimgut ritual, during which the spirits of the deceased are cleansed and guided into the afterlife, reinterpreting and regenerating it for contemporary, diasporic contexts. Considering mourning as an embodied practice, Yu maps grief and mourning across four locations with personal and political significance. Interweaving scenes from these filming locations throughout the looped, non-linear video allows the work to also reflect the complex ways grief and mourning unfold over time.

Experimental Modalities: Crip Representation and Access with Electronic Arts Intermix

Abstract In collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), a nonprofit video arts distributor, the author has found videos in EAI’s collection that may reflect upon themes of disability and/or engage modes of access like captioning and audio description. The video/film works referenced in conceptual and performance practices have been broadly tethered to the word “experimental” and situated in this context to engage with accessibility even for works that resist and challenge the very nature of legibility. This essay is the author’s first attempt to explore an archive to identify video artworks that represent disability (whether deliberately or not) and present alternative modes of access (whether deliberately or not) with the intent of laying a groundwork for curations that tap into possibilities within accessibility formats.

Retracted: Text Mining of Movie Animation User Comments and Video Artwork Recommendation Based on Machine Learning

Retracted: Text Mining of Movie Animation User Comments and Video Artwork Recommendation Based on Machine Learning

Splot kultur, splot obrazów. Fotograficzna „tkanina” pamięci Dinh Q. Lê

The paper aims to present the issues of post-memory arising from the photographic and video art works of Dinh Q Lę. The specific technique used by the American-Vietnamese artist can be described as “fabric” due to the post-media processing in the form of interwoven photographic strips connected to create an innovative combination dedicated to the connections between East and West, the sacred and the profane, and colour contrasts. Deconstruction of the initial material creates unconventional iconographic combinations that blur the clear meanings recorded in the image, with the aim of their secondary reconfiguration, often marked by traumatic war events. The peculiar form of expression seems to reflect the dynamics of a complex form, ambiguity, and allusion, which is no longer just an automatic reproduction of reality, but a creative field of transformations, weaving, entanglement of threads overlapping various spheres of reference, animation of the meanings of words transformed into moving images that reflect them. The subject of the considerations outlined in this article is an exhibition entitled Dinh Q.Lę. Le fil de la mémoire et autres photographs organised between February 8 and November 20, 2022 at the Musée de Quai Branly.

Fight, Flight, or Freeze: Stilling the Moving Image in Bruce Nauman’s Contrapposto Studies, i through vii

This article examines the ways in which Bruce Nauman’s art installations provoke audience experiences analogous to those felt during traumatic events. A central assertion of the present study is that the looping mechanisms of Nauman’s video artworks produce a theoretical stilling of the moving image that is reflective of the fight-flight-or-freeze response to a highly charged incident, which often entails a temporal shift as time appears to slow to a halt. Whereas in the past, the human response to acute stress was typically prompted by a physical threat in the natural environment, today an evolutionary misfire occurs when this survival mechanism becomes prompted instead during everyday situations. Throughout human history, the experience of viewing an artwork has developed into an act of aesthetic appreciation involving a search for meaning. However, in this case, the sensory overload triggered by Nauman’s artwork purposefully impedes neuroprocessing, highlighting the adverse effects of mediation saturation in contemporary society; therefore, a stilling of the moving image in essence functions as a biological adaptation strategy in an attempt to come to terms with the puzzling nature of these artworks. By applying French philosopher Roland Barthes’s theories of the image, this article expands Barthes’s thought from the image to the performative as a reflection of human adaptation to technological advancement.

Magic and Metamodernism

Magic and Metamodernism

Sound of Ikebana: Fluid Artwork Created under Zero-G Using Parabolic Flight

Abstract The authors, led by artist Naoko Tosa, discuss their collaboration on the video artwork Sound of Ikebana, made by applying sound vibration to fluid and shooting it with a high-speed camera. To study the fluid’s shape under zero gravity the authors experimented with generating the artwork under weightlessness achieved through parabolic flight. The authors confirmed that a new shape significantly different from the one created under normal gravity is created. A three-dimensional artwork was also generated by shooting the phenomenon from multiple viewpoints.

Shared Brains, Proprioceptiveness, and Critically Approaching the Animal as the Animal in Artworks

The animal and being animal is a proposition and position that invites observational and critical debate. Yet, the presence of the non-human animal is usually and normatively confined to representational artworks rather than the animal itself in the gallery or museum, which is, potentially, problematically anthropocentric. Using diverse methods, processes, and materials, and curious to a myriad of opening potentialities, Bartram + Deigaard, in contrast to this problem, explore working as humans from an animal-centric perspective through artistic research. They bring sensitivities to their handling of the animal, as both artistic subject and collaborator, to observe and engage with empathy and openness to animal insight and revelation and behaviour. Their works in performance, video, drawing, and printmaking foreground animal proximity and behaviour, inter-species proprioception, reciprocal caretaking, synchronised respiration, and companionate movement. This article explores the socialised and familiar in close observation, directly and indirectly, in their individual yet companion practices, illuminating the benefits of a radically enlarged sentiocentrism. It reflects on the allowing and embracing of other species within their artworks, and of being mindful and sensible with balancing sympathies and empathies as humans within an often unbalanced system of agency. Specifically, it gleans patterns and insights from their exhibition at Tippetts and Eccles Galleries at Utah State University in 2021, where they invited a canine collaborator into their thinking through praxis and the interventions and residual outcomes this created. This essay discusses two individual video artworks from each artist, which document their invitations to non-human animals into the gallery or museum, and two durational artworks curated within this exhibition.

비디오 아트의 영속성과 원본성에 대한 탐색적 연구

Restoration and exhibition in video art is an important policy consideration due to the timespan of 10-15 years of monitor of cathode ray tube. In particular, works recognized as the artist’s representative work or masterpiece should take into account the conflicting factors of permeance and originality in preservation and restoration. ‘The More, the Better’, arguably the largest piece by master Namjune Paik has recently re-operated after a long pause due to the aging monitor and the technical safety. 'The More, the Better' was installed in celebration of opening of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in the late 1980s. Along with its long history, 1,003 monitors in the piece reflects the historicity. Difficulty in supplying the monitors of that time demands the measures for restoration to reflect the originality, specificity, and symbolism. Building on the existing literature on the concept of 'Aura' by Walter Benjamin, this study seeks the perpetuality and the originality of the piece 'The More, The Better'. By conducting audience interviews and expert opinions, this paper aims to provide broader perspectives on the restoration of the above video art work. This paper compares three alternative restoration policies concerned with the above art work. Diverse and in-depth discussion will be needed to offer future direction of the preservation and restoration of the video work in the 1980s. This paper deals with the preservation/restoration of media art works by mediaartist Baek Nam-joon, owned by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, which represents the public nature of art enjoyment. More specifically, this study made suggestions for future video art preservation and restoration policies.

‘Genocide is climate change’: a conversation about colonized California and Indigenous futurism

This written conversation unpacks a phrase, ‘genocide is climate change,’ which co-author Christine Howard Sandoval wrote and featured in her video artwork, Niniwas- to belong here (2022). The authors discuss scholarship linking the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas to climate change and contextualize the assertion within an expanded archive of the Spanish missions in California. They address Howard Sandoval’s multimedia work in dialogue with Indigenous women’s basket weaving and land care practices, including the cultural use of fire, in order to consider how Indigenous arts can illuminate the intertwined apocalypses of colonization and climate change.

Пьерик Сорен. Комедия в видеоарте

The article reveals the genre-stylistic specificity of artworks of the French video artist Pierrick Sorin, created between the 1980s and the 2020s. It studies the methods and techniques characteristic of P. Sorin’s work, particular attention being paid to his use of comic techniques. The novelty of the research lies in the consideration of P. Sorin’s creative work as an integral artistic system in its development. The relevance of the present study is determined by the need to expand ideas about the principles of shaping and the features of drama in the genres of contemporary art. The article shows that P. Sorin developed the techniques and methods of video art in an original and spectacular way. Out of the creative methods used by the artist, the author of the article focuses on the following ones: the attraction of expressive means of other arts (cinema, circus, music hall, variety theatre, etc.) and the combination of modern technical and technological solutions with the style of comedy films, buffoonery, and clowning, which is manifested in the plots, expressive means, the specifics of the characters. The classification of P. Sorin’s works proposed by the author includes video art, optical theatres (miniature installations), stage performances and scenographic works. The author comes to the following conclusions: the plot structure of P. Sorin’s works, depending on the genre, includes miniature scenes-sketches, parody films that repeat scenario designs of the originals, and series of sketches combined in a holistic performance by means of recapitulation. In his scenographic works, P. Sorin creates a comic discourse, a play with the viewer based on technical attractions. The comic techniques characteristic of P. Sorin’s work are: comic absurdity, illogical or impossible combination of elements, the method of inconsistency, the method of unexpected, repetition, and the use of taboo topics.

The Living Dying Body: Arriving at the Awareness of All Life’s Interdependencies through a Video Artwork

In this article, I ask how an artwork handling mortality can address human belongingness to the rest of nature. I develop my argument from my video work, which I discuss through the concepts of ecosocialization and the "paradox of tragedy." The orientation of curiosity in artistic experiences may aid in generating a more welcoming relationship with the diverse affects of life's complexities and vulnerabilities. As a result of my artistic journey, I propose that art can help us abandon our aspirations of refuting human mortality and separating humans from the rest of nature and aid in recognizing all life's interdependencies vital for adopting the ecosocial life orientation.

Representation and Identity in Contemporary Women Artists’ Video

This essay is an initial study that examines selected contemporary video artworks addressing identity and representation by contemporary Italian women artists. The author shows how these women artists seek to avoid the objectification and sanitisation of the traditional iconographies involving women in patriarchal Catholic systems. Selected works by Elisabetta Di Sopra, Francesca Fini, and Mariateresa Sartori are discussed by comparing elements from works by earlier generations of feminist video artists, such as Pipilotti Rist, Elaine Shemilt, and Catherine Elwes. Drawing on theories of both video and feminist art, this article examines how the development of a new aesthetic in early women’s video art practice in the 1970s and 1980s is still relevant to the task of critically examining and assessing aesthetics in video today, and how video remains a key tool used to experiment with the remediation of women’s representation and identity.

Achieving cultural sustainability through the preservation of video art: open distribution platforms

Video art has earned its spot within cultural heritage since the beginning of the 1970s, especially as a medium for activist practices, and it is now one of the most collected and exhibited artistic typologies in museums. The use of video art as a means of social protest and reflection continues to produce relevant artworks in the present day that constitute a part of our collective memory and that need to be safeguarded for the future, since they act as a valuable means of expression for marginal collectives and alternative ways of living. In this regard, the preservation of cultural heritage is a part of what has been called cultural sustainability: an essential part of sustainable development, which refers to the necessity of ensuring the access of future generations to past and current artistic practices. The following research reflects on what cultural sustainability means for cultural institutions and museums, and how availability is fundamental to the preservation of video artworks, endangered by technological obsolescence. Specifically, single-channel video is examined from a conservator’s perspective and some ethical considerations are examined regarding its obsolescence and reproducibility. Subsequently, with the idea that proliferation equals conservation, some institutional initiatives are presented that use the Internet as an environment for video art distribution across the world; the issue of copyright is also examined, under the belief of open distribution and fair use. What does the future of video art hold? How can we ensure sustainable cultural development? And is it possible for museums to balance private and public interests? This article reflects on these questions and tries to provide some answers based on the idea of preservation through open access. Keywords: video art, activism, preservation, cultural sustainability, access

Lições da Evolução: uma abordagem transdisciplinar a partir da arte

ABSTRACT The paper discusses the transdisciplinarity between the fields of knowledge and the contribution of visual arts to teaching natural sciences. The author’s own video artwork Evolutions in 3 Lessons is presented, in which stories related to the theory of evolution and colonialism are intertwined, seeking to offer a complex view of the relationship between white humans, non-white humans and non-human animals. It is concluded that the teaching of science allied to the sensitive perception provided by art can contribute to the constitution of a plural world in which respect for otherness and communication between the fields of knowledge occur in a more integral and collaborative way, without ceasing to the complexities of each area.

텔레비전 천만 생산 시대의 “‘다다익선’ (多多益善 · The More, The Better)”: 1980년대 삼성의 홍보 전략과 백남준의 비디오 예술

This study combines a social history of business corporations with art history, taking as its principal case study the relationship between Samsung Electronics and Nam June Paik’s 1988 video artwork “Dada ikseon.” The study shows that Samsung strengthened its hold over the electronics industry by employing a PR strategy that enabled Samsung Electronics to emerge as an industrial frontrunner in the 1980s. To this end, in 1984 Samsung Electronics formed a strategic partnership with video artist Nam June Paik. The study discusses how the strategic relationship between these two parties developed when the Korean government requested an artwork for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. A core argument is that this moment provided Paik with an opportunity to fully utilize Samsung Electronics’ technical resources, while Samsung, in turn, made use of his reputation as an opportunity to show its transformation into a company with cutting-edge technology. This study finally shows the ways in which Samsung Electronics’ engineering technologies were absorbed into “Dada ikseon” through this strategic relationship, resulting in an artwork that was as much an outcome of Samsung’s engineering prowess as it was of Paik’s artistic abilities.